Portfolio of Homes by Peter Marino

No one blends high-voltage style with timeless elegance better than the celebrated New York architect and interior designer. Here’s a selection of his memorable residential projects featured in the pages of AD

For his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, Ty Warner collaborated with Marino and the building’s co-architect I. M. Pei, who had always desired “a little bit of theater” for the 52nd-story penthouse. Overseeing the structural redesign of the interior as well as all of the furnishings, Marino created a home that reads like a multilayered, site-specific artwork—with virtually every decor detail and piece of furniture having been commissioned. Gilt-bronze vines frame the bookcases in the 700-square-foot, cathedral-ceilinged library—a room clad in panels that were crafted in Italy, deconstructed and sent to France to be finished in a rich lacquer, and then shipped to New York for installation. (July 2007)

Durston Saylor

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Architect and designer Peter Marino converted a Georgian-style club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side into a spirited residence for a young art-collecting couple and their children. “There’s a very important aspect to all my work, now more than ever, which is tying the interior design and architecture with the art,” Marino says. “We didn’t want to do an all-white space that looked like a generic downtown gallery transplanted uptown. We had to balance the contemporary art with rich finishes.” Here, Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #767 (the first piece the couple bought together) dominates a living room sitting area, where a pair of Marino-designed slipper chairs offsets the boldness of the space. (April 2007)

Durston Saylor

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Marino was given carte blanche to gut-renovate a couple’s duplex in Paris’s Palais-Royal. “One of the reasons we love Peter,” the husband says, “is that he instantly sizes up the existing bones of a place, listens attentively to your goals for it, and comes up with the most imaginative solution for achieving them.” With the building’s classical architecture and the homeowners’ impressive minimalist art in mind, the designer brought a 1920s and ’30s French modernist sensibility to the interiors, incorporating first-rate furnishings in a clean, streamlined fashion. A photo piece by Jeff Wall is displayed atop a bronze armoire in the salon, and Claude Lalanne created the bronze bamboo ornamentation on the fireplace; the low table is by Yves Klein. (December 2003)

John M. Hall

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“We needed an electric charge of le style Rothschild,” Marino says of a 1929 Tudor Revival house he renovated for a couple in Greenwich, Connecticut. His solution? “Fabrics with an exotic texture, a splash of chartreuse in every room, and furnishings that channeled the Raj,” he says. “A beefy Tudor mansion needs some spice from the East to enhance its flavor.” Marino designed the living room’s striking wall covering, which was inspired by traditional Indian motifs. (May 2008)

Durston Saylor

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Commissioned to expand and update this 1929 residence in Dallas, Marino added two wings and crafted sophisticated interiors. The living room, featuring refined furnishings in a subtle palette, is enlivened by a Joan Mitchell painting (not seen here) and a graceful second-century Roman statue of Venus. (April 2006)

Matthew Millman

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In this art-filled 1930s Manhattan apartment, Marino seamlessly integrated neoclassical tables and 18th-century chairs with the owners’ museum-worthy collection, which includes works by Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Andy Warhol. A group of Scandinavian paintings hangs in the library, where Marino designed the hand-printed wall covering. (March 2000)

Michael Moran

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A master of artfully juxtaposing styles and eras, Marino combined modern furnishings and traditional Southeast Asian elements in a couple’s sophisticated Palm Beach villa. The starting point for the design was their collection of ancient sculpture, including a seated Buddha in the dining pavilion that looks out toward the courtyard pool. (January 2008)

Scott Frances

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Classical music is Marino’s passion, and he thinks about architecture much like a composer. He entirely reinvented a prewar Manhattan apartment (a place he describes as previously having been “really quite tragic”) by introducing an assemblage of first-rate furnishings, opulent masonry and finishes, and blue-chip art. In the dining room, sunburst mirrors and a 1999 Jason Martin painting accent the walls, which are covered in embossed-leather paneling with silver-gilt overleaf. (January 2009)

Durston Saylor

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“This is an American dream house,” Marino says of a couple’s villa in the Southwest that he renovated, significantly expanding the original 1939 structure, designed by Maurice Fatio. The clients, who have a large family, wanted to double the square footage of their property without conspicuously raising its profile. Marino delivered with an expansion so artfully integrated that even from the driveway, he observes, “You don’t notice how rambling the house is.” (May 2009)